Review: The Alaska Native Reader edited by Maria Shaa Tláa Williams

Native Notes from the North

by Keith Goetzman

| January-February 2010

There are voluminous accounts of Alaska’s white sourdoughs, homesteaders, mountaineers, and trophy hunters, but one person’s frontier is another’s sacred homeland, and Native voices are often underplayed or overlooked in the popular written record. The Alaska Native Reader: History, Culture, Politics is a welcome antidote. From a heartrending description of the long shadow of the Great Death—the 1900 flu outbreak—to mythological tales of magical northern pike and a project unearthing the Indian history of the Anchorage area, this reader is a breath of fresh tundra air.